All posts tagged Oscar

First thing to know about movies in Saudi Arabia: There are no movies in Saudi Arabia.

“No, no, don’t say ‘movie theater!”’ a Saudi businessman said last year, interrupting his account about the filming of an Imax documentary on Islam’s annual hajj to adjust the nomenclature of the person questioning.

Saudi Arabia’s religious conservatives successfully pushed to outlaw theaters in the 1980s. Since then, about the kingdom’s only public picture show has been a sword-clanging documentary on the rise of the al-Saud royal family, on continuous loop at a historical center in Riyadh.

How much more remarkable, then, that Saudi film-maker Haifaa Mansour’s “Wadjda” has prevailed to newly become Saudi Arabia’s first-ever selection for Oscar nomination, in this year’s foreign-language category. Read More »